> On Sep 22, 2022, at 04:27, Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > When creating hugetlb pages, the hugetlb code must first allocate > contiguous pages from a low level allocator such as buddy, cma or > memblock. The pages returned from these low level allocators are > ref counted. This creates potential issues with other code taking > speculative references on these pages before they can be transformed to > a hugetlb page. This issue has been addressed with methods and code > such as that provided in [1]. > > Recent discussions about vmemmap freeing [2] have indicated that it > would be beneficial to freeze all sub pages, including the head page > of pages returned from low level allocators before converting to a > hugetlb page. This helps avoid races if we want to replace the page > containing vmemmap for the head page. > > There have been proposals to change at least the buddy allocator to > return frozen pages as described at [3]. If such a change is made, it > can be employed by the hugetlb code. However, as mentioned above > hugetlb uses several low level allocators so each would need to be > modified to return frozen pages. For now, we can manually freeze the > returned pages. This is done in two places: > 1) alloc_buddy_huge_page, only the returned head page is ref counted. > We freeze the head page, retrying once in the VERY rare case where > there may be an inflated ref count. > 2) prep_compound_gigantic_page, for gigantic pages the current code > freezes all pages except the head page. New code will simply freeze > the head page as well. > > In a few other places, code checks for inflated ref counts on newly > allocated hugetlb pages. With the modifications to freeze after > allocating, this code can be removed. > > After hugetlb pages are freshly allocated, they are often added to the > hugetlb free lists. Since these pages were previously ref counted, this > was done via put_page() which would end up calling the hugetlb > destructor: free_huge_page. With changes to freeze pages, we simply > call free_huge_page directly to add the pages to the free list. > > In a few other places, freshly allocated hugetlb pages were immediately > put into use, and the expectation was they were already ref counted. In > these cases, we must manually ref count the page. > > [1] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20210622021423.154662-3-mike.kravetz@xxxxxxxxxx/ > [2] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20220802180309.19340-1-joao.m.martins@xxxxxxxxxx/ > [3] https://lore.kernel.org/linux-mm/20220809171854.3725722-1-willy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx/ > > Signed-off-by: Mike Kravetz <mike.kravetz@xxxxxxxxxx> Thanks Mike. Reviewed-by: Muchun Song <songmuchun@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
